Tag Archive for 'journalism'

MG Siegler wrote a post following our exchange on Twitter. I called him out because for the second time that day, I had logged into Quora only to see minutes later a TechCrunch post being Tweeted that was rehashing the original Quora discussion. Is this the future of journalism?

For the bloggers out there who receive bonuses by getting headlines on Techmeme — what’s stopping Gabe Rivera (Techmeme’s founder) from simply importing the RSS feed of Quora posts and having its human editors headline the best answer? As Siegler points out, he (worryingly) already has. Given Quora responses are like blog posts and get aggregated into a community wiki-like answer summary, I can’t see why this won’t become a new input source for Techmeme, completely bypassing the traditional blogs.

And while we are on the topic: Julian Assange of Wikileaks argues that they are pioneering a new form of journalism, which he recently argued in an editorial for The Australian, as “Scientific journalism“. Scientific because you can read the source of the material in its naked form or accompanying an article that discusses the source.

Source material is democratised
Journalists, it is said, are becoming curators of information. Siegler claims he has retrieved information from an obscure source, amplified it, which in turn will be broadcasted by a bigger publisher like CNN. But if Quora democratices the source gathering — it’s so obscure that everyone in Silicon Valley is on it, include billionaires like Steve Chase who founded AOL and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook — what’s stopping me from “breaking” the apparent news? Or Rivera from doing a direct RSS import of the top answers, direct to his audience of thousands?

If the big blogs are traffic hungry that have them reliant on the aggregators like Techmeme to feed their pageviews….And if this trend to scientific journalism is being promoted, where journalistic bias adds colour to a source only if you want (rather then the bias being the source of your information consumption) — then one has to ponder. That the evolution of journalism will come not from changes in journalistic style, but by changes in technology — an evolution where every single one of us can talk openly about the world and in an applied way.

Siegler says this is business as usual for the bloggers, but I think it’s business as usual for the disruption technology is generating for the news making business. Disruption that will continue to favour those who tease out the source of news (like Quora, Twitter and Wikileaks has) and those who curate it into an efficient way to consume (like aggregators such as Techmeme, Google News and Digg).

The future of journalism resides with those that create the originating value: traffic or content
Before the Internet, newspapers were the sole source of information and so had an elevated role in society. Now they are being relegated to just one of the many sources of news; once considered a horror if they disappeared, they would not impact the world if they went bankrupt today (as there are plenty of online mastheads to replace their value). As social media technologies continue to be refined — where the participants curate the source material themselves — blogs will not disappear like how newspapers won’t disappear. But their position in the world is far from guaranteed, as the audience curation is being done better by the aggregators and the source material is now no longer proprietary to a journalist.

How I sold the idea of a wiki at PwC
In 2006, I pitched to senior management at my firm – the world’s largest knowledge firm – that we were failing at how we did knowledge. More specifically, I argued that the systems in place was creating opportunity cost, because the way we viewed “knowledge” was wrong – and the systems we had only supported one type. As a solution, I proposed we implement Web2.0 tools as a way of changing this.

What I want to share more of however, is the actual problem I identified. It was a problem that senior management knew existed but in different words. What I did was give the intellectual justification that created the “ah-ha” moment.

Soft knowledge versus hard knowledge
Central to my thesis was that knowledge had a continuum, and that we have traditionally said knowledge was a product only. The physical output of knowledge in the industrial society has been some published form like a book or a magazine. This output therefore defined the perspective of this product – multiple reviews of the content, close scrutiny of what was being said, and careful consideration of what made the final cut. It was expensive to create a book, and so quite reasonably, we’ve aimed at making it perfect.

However most knowledge within a firm doesn’t exist in a published form. When we talk about sharing knowledge within organisations, we are actually actually referring to having people talk to each other. Human conversation is the most established type of human knowledge transfer, and until the alphabet was adopted by various cultures, was the only way knowledge could be transmitted. This is called “soft knowledge”, and it’s not better or worse than “hard” knowledge, but just a different state on the continuum.

Soft knowledge rapidly evolves. It never has a fixed state. Sometimes, it never ever makes it up the line to become “hard” knowledge, or solidified – but this doesn’t make it useless. In fact, when it comes to doing our work, this tacit knowledge doesn’t need a fixed state – it’s a fluid piece of knowledge that will never justify it being published in a hard-bound book. Like a dynamic conversation between a group of people, the ideas are rapidly evolving so fast that trying to lock it down actually ruins the process. Soft knowledge is not so much a product but a process – like rapidly firing electrons remixing towards the goal of a more solid state.

The ‘always-beta’ culture
Technology is enabling us to evolve our ability to communicate. Its gone beyond a one-to-one and one-to-many model that we’ve traditionally been accustomed to, but now allowing a many-to-many model. This new form of communication is allowing knowledge to get better captured in this ‘soft’ state. Categories are no longer useful, even though as a society hierarchies and linearity is how we are accustomed to the world. We need to now become more adapt at analysing knowledge through a network.

When it comes to information (including the news), the value comes not from its accuracy but its availability. If I have an emergency situation on a client, I want all the available options for me to assist in my decision making. As a professional, I can then assess what route to take. Although pre-certification of knowledge has value in accuracy, sometimes full accuracy results in a bigger opportunity cost: inaction.

There will always be a place for news as a product. But what we need right now is to understand blogs do news differently, and potentially for news itself, might be a better model. And whether you like it or not, it’s worked before- after all, we’ve been doing conversation now for close to a 100,000 years. If we never did it, we’d never end up to where we are now.

Last week, Deep Throat died. No, not the porn actress but the guy who was effectively in operational control of the FBI during the Nixon years. Mark Felt was a guy who was in line to run the FBI from his number three position, but was passed up by Nixon who brought in an outsider. Whilst people often remark that the Russian government is controlled by the intelligence services, it’s worth reflecting that the poster-child of the free world has its own domestic intelligence services yielding too much power over the presidents. Nixon broke tradition for the first time in 48 years, doing something other presidents couldn’t do: it was appointing an outsider to run the agency. And so lays the roots to his downfall, in one of the most dramatic episodes in the mass media’s history – a newspaper brought the downfall of one of the the most powerful men in the world.

Journalists have celebrated the Post’s role in bringing down the president for a generation. Even after the revelation of Deep Throat’s identity in 2005, there was no serious soul-searching on the omission from the historical record. Without understanding the role played by Felt and the FBI in bringing Nixon down, Watergate cannot be understood completely. Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee were willingly used by Felt to destroy Nixon. The three acknowledged a secret source, but they did not reveal that the secret source was in operational control of the FBI. They did not reveal that the FBI was passing on the fruits of surveillance of the White House. They did not reveal the genesis of the fall of Nixon. They accepted the accolades while withholding an extraordinarily important fact, elevating their own role in the episode while distorting the actual dynamic of Nixon’s fall.

Absent any widespread reconsideration of the Post’s actions during Watergate in the three years since Felt’s identity became known, the press in Washington continues to serve as a conduit for leaks of secret information. They publish this information while protecting the leakers, and therefore the leakers’ motives. Rather than being a venue for the neutral reporting of events, journalism thus becomes the arena in which political power plays are executed. What appears to be enterprising journalism is in fact a symbiotic relationship between journalists and government factions. It may be the best path journalists have for acquiring secrets, but it creates a very partial record of events — especially since the origin of a leak frequently is much more important to the public than the leak itself.

Now consider my own experiences as an amateur journalist.

After several years of failed media experiments, my university enterprise (I did it as a society, not as a company, because I want to treat this as my "throw-away" startup to learn but not be tied down when I left) at changing student media suddenly hit the gold mine: we created an online weekly "news digest" that literally became the talk of the campus for those in the university administration and the people surrounding it. An elite audience (not the 40,000 University of Sydney crowd), but the several hundreds of people that theoretically represented the campus and ran the multi-million dollar student infrastructure. Of the 23 editions we created that year, we literally had people hanging off their seats for the next edition: trying to predict the new URL, and e-mails with quotes of it sent out within hours of publishing.

It was interesting because of how the product evolved during its first year. I started it thinking it would be a cool thing to have a summary of the news, once a week, in a "digest" format. The news was split arbitrarily as student, Australian and international. However within a few editions, the student news segment was no longer just about the latest party but about confidential information and the core reason why people read it. In the second edition I wrote:

USYD UNION: Chris Farral has been hired as the Union's new General Manager. Farral has a highly reputable background in the ABC and various community-based groups. It has been a decade since the Union's last General Manager was appointed, and as such we hope Farral will bring a new flair and vitality to the position. Chris also happens to be the father of HoniSoit editor Sophie. Does this mean an end to critical analysis in Honi's reporting of the traditionally stale and bitter Union? No. That would require there to have been critical analysis in the first place. (EB)

Cheekily written but an innocent attempt to report news. Someone saw that, realised we had an audience, and in edition three we revealed:

SYDNEY UNIVERSITY UNION: Last week we reported that Chris Farrell was appointed the new General Manager of Sydney University’s student union. This week we can reveal that close to $50,000 was spent on external recruitment agencies to find Mr Farrell. Where was he hiding? The selection panel was evenly split for two candidates: Paul McJamett, the current Facilities Manager and previously expected next-in-line for the job, was supported by Vice-President Penny Crossley, Ex-President Ani Satchithanada, and Human Resources Manager Sandra Hardie. Meanwhile Farrell was supported by current President Toby Brennan, and the two senate reps (one of whom is new this year to the Board). Crossley is rumoured to have crossed the floor, and made the casting vote for Farrell. (Elias Bizannes)

And then we go threatened with a law suit (the first of many in my life, it would turn out) because we exposed some dirty secrets of a very politicised group of people. The reason I wanted to share that story, was to have you see how we evolved from a “summary of the news” to a “tool for the politicians”. The rest of that year, I had people in all the different factions developing relationships with me and breaking news. Yes, I knew I was being played for their own reasons. However it was a two way using: I was getting access to confidential information from the insiders. Our little creation turned into a battleground for the local politicians – and so long as I could manage the players equally, I won just as much as they did, if not more.

Up until now, I never realised (or really thought) that my experience in student journalism was actually how the big players of the world operate. Forget the crap about what journalism is: at its core, it’s about creating relationships with insiders and being part of a game in politics, that as a by-product (not a function) also creates accountability and order in society.

On the future of journalism
For as long as we have politics, we will have “journalists”. In the tech industry for example, the major blogs have become a tool for companies. I recently saw an example where I e-mailed a CEO of a prominent startup about an issue, and within days, two major blogs posted some old news to get exposure to fixing the issue. This CEO used his media credits with the publishers of these blogs, to help him with the issue. It’s the same dynamic described above: people who create news and people with the audience. Heck – we have an entire industry created to manage those two groups: the Public Relations industry.

Personally, I’m still trying to work out if the captive audience has now left the building. But my 2004 experiment in student media – targeting the same Gen Y’s that don’t read newspapers – is recent enough experience to prove the Internet hasn’t broken this relationship yet. If you are looking to see what the future of journalism and especially the media is – you need to follow where the audience is. But a word of caution: don’t measure the audience by its size, but by its type. One million people may read the blog TechCrunch, but it’s the same one-million early adopters around the world that are asked by their Luddite families to fix the video recording machine. There is an indirect reader of a publication, but they are just as much influenced and can be reached out to, if determined by the direct reader. Even though Michael Arrington who started TechCrunch was a corporate lawyer, his successful blog has now done what the mass media used to do. That’s something worth recognising as the core to his success, I think. Certainly, it validates that the future is just like the past – just slightly tweaked in its delivery.

Writing has always been my thing – which would explain why I started a student newspaper in high school. My interest in politics & current affairs, combined with my writing skills, had me flirt with a career in journalism. Disappointed with student media at university, I started a society for journalists, which was meant to be a democratically run media outlet that created various thought-provoking publications.

Six months after the concept came to me on the back of an envelope whilst visiting family in Athens and London, we created a 24 page colour magazine, with a print run of 4,000 – fully funding the cost with local advertising. Among many lessons from that experience, I learnt two valuable ones: funding is hard, and distribution is key. Better said, funding was a function of distribution – you are not going to get advertisers without an audience. Distribution was the key to having an audience.

That experience led me to experiment with a website, with bling bling effects thanks to Microsoft Frontpage. What was originally meant to be a complement of the print publication, soon in my eyes became the future. In various forms, we tried community-generated journalism, and built a strong following of readers through a weekly web publication on a niche topic (local campus politics).

So whilst that is very much skimming over the top of that 2 1/2 years, I think it illustrates how I’ve experienced through a natural progression of what is now called citizen journalism (or CitJ if you’re cool). I was interested to hear about Bronwen Clune’s Norg network when I met her at webjam and reading Pete Cashmore’s opinion that citizen journalism is dead has me feel like it’s time I wrote about what I think on the issue.

Blogs + adsense is what threatens citizen journalism start-ups

Citizen journalism is not dead – you only have to check out the political blogosphere to realise that. That then leads us to the argument of what is journalism and what is blogging, but I think it’s fair to say, blogging as a form of writing is like editorial pages. Blogging can be a form of journalism – but blogging can also be something else: they are not mutually exclusive. We should also not confuse the fact that a blog as a technology tool is to be treated differently from blogging as a writing style.

What threatens Citizen Journalism as a business model, is that anyone can create a blog and anyone can insert ads into their blog to make money?Ç? – you can be your own publisher with $0. However therein also lies the opportunity for CitJ news organisations – blogs take time to build a brand (like any other publication) and just because you can wack some ads on your blog, doesn’t mean you can make money out of it.

I used to think the Internet eliminated the need for a strong distribution network. Just because it’s cheaper however, doesn’t mean it’s easier: the benefit of economies of scale in the industrial era hold true for the information age. Citizen Journalism as a concept works – however as a business model, it’s still being tweaked. The key is to realise the power of being an aggregator whereby individuals have access to an audience, and don’t have to worry about chasing advertisers.

It’s not that citizen journalism doesn’t work – it’s that the platform to enable it hasn’t been figured out. South Korea’s Ohmynews has proven that it works,?Ç? however citizen journalism platforms are reliant on the local culture of the audience. It’s not so much about the technology (we’ve got that), as it is the culture – afterall, people engineering is a lot harder to do than machine engineering.

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Hi - my name is Elias Bizannes, tweetfully known as @EliasBiz where I tend to post more. I've been blessed with not just one but two unpronounceable names: I pronounce them as E-lee-uh(s) bi-ZAH-nis